The present invention relates to a method of, generating characters, and more particularly to a method of generating multiple master typefaces containing kanji characters.
A set of characters with a particular design is called a “typeface”. Digital typefaces, such as the Postscript® products available from Adobe Systems Incorporated in San Jose, Calif., generally include instructions for rendering characters in a particular font. The term “font” refers to an instance of a typeface, e.g., a particular weight and point size. The term “character” refers to any form of letter, number, symbol, ideograph or the like.
Although many typefaces have been developed for phonetic alphabets, far fewer typefaces have been developed for ideographic writing systems. In most ideographic writing systems, the number of characters is exceptionally large, the form of each character is different, and the characters are structurally complex. The most common ideographic characters currently in use are kanji characters. Kanji characters are currently used in China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam and Malaysia. In contrast to phonetic alphabets, which typically contain less than 100 characters (including upper and lower case variants of the same letter), there are several thousand kanji characters. In addition, in contrast to phonetic alphabets in which most characters contain only two or three strokes, the two thousand most-used kanji characters contain an average of about eleven strokes each, and some characters contain sixty or more strokes.
Given the huge number of characters and their complexity, the development of a kanji typeface, i.e., a typeface containing at least the commonly used kanji characters, is a long and arduous process.
One conventional method of generating kanji characters requires a set of line components each having a pre-defined size and orientation. Each kanji character is generated by placing pre-defined line components in pre-defined positions. Unfortunately, this method is limited to the creation of characters composed of the specific line components. Thus, the typeface is limited to a single font.
A more recent method of generating kanji characters is to use a multiple master typeface. Prior to the development of multiple master typefaces, a typeface (whether for kanji or phonetic alphabets) typically included only several discrete fonts, such as regular, semi-bold, and bold. Users were limited to the choices available, or they had to use artificial techniques for bolding, lightening, expanding or compressing an existing font. Unfortunately, such artificial techniques often resulted in the unintentional creation of characters with anomalous or unaesthetic features.
A multiple master typeface allows the user to create a myriad of fonts by setting font design variables which define font properties such as width, weight and size. The user can generate a font by interpolating between various master fonts. The font design variables are used to determine the relative weights of the master characters in each composite character. Multiple master typefaces have been described (for phonetic alphabets) in U.S. Pat. No. 4,933,866, which is incorporated herein by reference.
Unfortunately, although multiple master typefaces permit the user to create kanji characters in variety of fonts, the creation of a kanji typeface remains a long and arduous process for the font developer. In fact, the problem is only compounded for multiple master typefaces because an entire font must be generated for each master font.